This is the heartwarming tale of a lowly power window motor, resurrected from certain death.

So, for about 6 months now my drivers-side power window has refused to budge. Quite aside from the annoyance of not being able to drape one’s elbow lazily out the window on a nice day, it makes for rather awkward interactions with barrier-arm booths and the odd police stop. Initially, it still made clicking sounds as though it really wanted to work but just couldn’t quite. I have brought two rear windows back to life by taking them out and giving them a good old clean. By the time I got around to addressing this one, however, the motor itself seemed as dead as a door-nail. Hooking up my trusty 12-volt testing adaptor produced no sign of life. I figured I must have burned out the motor with my occasional attempts to see whether ‘today would be the day’ it started working again.

I had a quick look online for replacement motors, but after seeing the prices very quickly stopped that crazy business! I then decided that I would sacrifice the rear passenger window for my own personal comfort (the motors are the same front and rear, but not left and right).

I removed the offending unit first and checked it out. And my good lord was it a hot mess!

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Holy cow, check out this corrosion! No wonder it was bound up:

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Yuck!

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After cleaning with engine degreaser:

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Nasty!

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This little ball secures one end of the shaft. Fortunately the corroded part has no effect on function:

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Now this is where the story picks up. Unfortunately, since I thought the motor was sure-thing shot, I didn’t bother taking photos. But on removing it from the housing, I noticed that the commutator (circled below) was completely gunked up, and smeared liberally with crap. There was no distinction between the segments:

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Hmmm, I thought, and proceeded to clean it up using a bit of emery paper and a sharp tool to carefully scour the grooves. I popped the motor back in its housing and gave it 12 volts, and lo! It spun up good as new!

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Now all that remained was to clean the rest of the nastiness as best as I could. Below you can see a little corrosion remaining on the shaft after taking some sandpaper to it while spinning:

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Whatever this part is called has been sanded and treated with rust converter:

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Next was to prepare the cog housing. The fiberous washer on the area circled below had disintegrated, but I was too impatient to try and source another one, so decided a plastic one, if tightly fitted, should to the job quite well.

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I cut a piece of plastic from an old coolant container, and drilled the centre hole between two pieces of wood to get a perfect edge.

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The washer was then cut out with scissors.

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A nice tight fit:

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Time to assemble the unit. Not sure if this is the recommended sealant for this job, but it is what I had on hand and seems to do the trick:

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And together again! Nicely lubed up with a little general purpose grease (not too much):

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Ahhh, crap. In my enthusiasm, I forgot that I needed to drill and tap screw holes where rivets had previously held the cover plate on! And now everything was covered in nice sticky grease. So to prevent my newly refurbished mechanism from becoming a bed of aluminium filings, a paper towel to the rescue:

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Tapping screw holes:

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And now to reinstallation. I think that the main reason for the amount of crap in the motor is that the weather stripping on the window is failing somewhat, meaning that a lot of water and road grime is simply coming into the door and down over the window mechanism whenever it rains or I wash the car. If I can prevent this to some extent, I should be able to prevent the problem arising again. To this end, I enlisted an old plastic shower curtain 🙂 … It is simply held in place by the window sitting on the mechanism rail and is cut so that when the window is fully up it drapes all the way to the bottom of the door and protects the entire mechanism from water, simply funnelling it all the way down to the drain holes at the bottom of the door. When the window is lowered, it simply folds itself up nicely.

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And all back together! Faithfull assistant happy with a job well done.